Further Information

And the Winners Are...All the Same! Why Winning Groups Are Stereotyped

In
some recent research,
my colleagues and I investigated whether people stereotype winning
groups more
than losing groups. In other words, do people perceive the members of
winning
groups to be more similar to one another than the members of losing
groups? Traditionally, social psychologists have assumed that it is low status groups, low power groups, and minority
groups that bear the brunt of stereotyping with more positive, high status,
high power, majority groups being considered as unique individuals.
In our research, we challenged this prevailing view. We predicted that,
in the context of a competition between groups, winning groups would be
stereotyped more than losing groups because people have an implicit
understanding that uniformity, group cohesiveness, and co-ordination are associated with better
group performance.

To
test our
prediction, we asked 175 research participants to view the photographs
of four
women who were ostensibly part of a team of fashion designers. We told
half of
our participants that the team had won a fashion design competition and
the other half that the team had lost the competition. We then asked
participants to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with a series
of
statements about how similar or different the fashion designers were to one another (e.g., “Generally, the
fashion
designers...are similar to each other”).

Our
statistical analyses showed that participants
who were told that the fashion design team had won the competition rated
the four
women as being significantly more similar to one another (i.e., more
homogeneous)
than participants who were told that the team had lost. To check that
this
finding generalized to other groups, we performed a second study that
referred
to architects who took part in a building design competition. We
obtained
similar results: Participants rated the members of the winning group as
being
more similar to one another than the members of the losing group. In
addition,
they perceived the winning group to be more cohesive, agreeing more
strongly with statements such as “I think that the...architects
worked well together”.

These
results suggest that it is not just low status groups, low power groups, and minority groups that
face relatively high levels of stereotyping. In the context of an intergroup
competition, winning groups also appear to be stereotyped. Our use of fashion
designers and architects as target groups, make our results all the more interesting.
People in these professions tend to do well if they generate distinctive and
unique ideas. But even they need to put aside their individuality and pull
together as a coherent team in order to win a competition – or at least that’s
the way our research participants appeared to interpret things.

We’ve shown
that people perceive winning groups to be more homogeneous than losing groups. But an interesting
question for future research is whether people perceive homogeneous groups to
be more like winners than heterogeneous groups.Military forces often put on public displays in
which they demonstrate the uniformity, homogeneity, cohesiveness, and
co-ordination of their soldiers. It’s possible that these displays are
functional because people, including opposing military forces, perceive homogeneous
groups to be potential winners of any military action.

For more information about this research, please see the following journal article: